Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday October 10, 2015 @07:06PM
from the trying-harder-than-academia dept.

theodp writes: Several weeks ago, Google launched Brotli, a new open source compression algorithm for the web. Since then, controversy broke out over the choice of 'bro' as the content encoding type. "We are hoping to establish a file ending .bro for brotli compressed files, a command line tool 'bro' for compressing and uncompressing brotli files, and a accept/content encoding type 'bro'," explained Google software engineer Jyrki Alakuijala. "Can I talk you out of it?," replied Mozilla SW engineer Patrick McManus. "'bro' has a gender problem, even though the dual meaning is unintentional. It comes of[f] misogynistic and unprofessional due to the world it lives in." Despite some pushback from commenters, a GitHub commit made by Google's Zoltan Szabadka shows that there will be no '.bro' in Brotli. "I have asked a feminist friend from the North American culture-sphere, and she advised against bro," explained Alakuijala. "We have found a compromise that satisfies us, so we don't need to discuss this further. Even if we don't understand why people are upset from our cultural standpoint, they would be (unnecessarily) upset and this is enough reason not to use it."

But nobody except the HR cares about your response. After all, this is a corporate-backed project, so what matters is the response of your corporate patron, in this case Google. Which, apparently, cares more about getting things done than defending some arbitrary line in sand.

"I have asked a feminist friend from the North American culture-sphere, and she advised against bro,"

I asked a friend from a subgroup of the Congolese Luba people and in their dialect of Luba-Kasai "br" means "sodomise my three-year-old with a cucumber". Only three people actually speak this dialect and they're all over ninety, but still, someone somewhere finds it offensive, so your choice of "br" cannot be used as it is both offensive and racist.

I demand that you change the extension to "cutefluffybunniessoftcottonwoolwarmness", but only after polling every single ethnic group, subculture, and political and religious belief in the world to ensure that none of them can figure out a way in which it offends them.

Hunch correct. I've met Jyrki. He's a great guy. Also - a Finn who lives in Switzerland, not an American.

Jyrki is very smart, not prone to bullshit or nonsense. He surely knows this issue is ridiculous, which is why they moved on so fast with only a minor comment about "not understanding why people are upset". There are more important things to do in life than argue with people who are wrong on the internet.

Note the example there with gendered terms... Is being called fucking HATRED OF WOMEN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268.Bro pages (man pages with example) are raked over the coals

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Man-Page/Man pages now have disclaimers to explain that man is short for manual, so please don't be offended

This HOWTO explains what you should bear in mind when you are going to write on-line documentation -- a so-called man page -- that you want to make accessible via the man(1) command. Throughout this HOWTO, a manual entry is simply referred to as a man page, regardless of actual length and without sexist intention.

I just alias apropos to woman for the best of both worlds:-) Honestly, all this SJW crap is demeaning to women, as are the push for more girls to pick up coding and having it be assume that we have to be protected from a three letter file extension.

"man pages" are now "person pages" and include a provision to reword everything to a gender neutral wording.

"cat" is no longer acceptable due to the outcry of people allergic to feline fur and is now "domestic_animal". Softlinks to "cat" may be permissive if the owner of the system can show that no allergic person could ever be subjected to the computer, which means that laptops, tablets and the like must not use such a symlink.

It will no longer be able to use the "force" option in commands. Such behaviour is unacceptable and the option is now being ignored by the command and its use logged, with mandatory monthly reviews to correct such behaviour in users who continue to try to use it.

"sendmail" is no longer acceptable due to the obvious gender bias and is renamed "sendmessage".

The "touch" command may only be used on files the creation date of which is longer than 18 years in the past and where the user is in the touch_permitted database of the file. By default touch is not allowed until the program explicitly allows it to a certain user.

"LaTeX" is no longer to be used due to environmental concerns.

"kill" has always been a command of great concern and is now entirely limited to use for root only, who may only execute it after the process has been deemed required to be killed by at least 12 other processes running.

Anyone who's read any sci-fi and thinks that slaving a pair of waldos to your hand movements is racist is messed up. Good luck to the librarians censoring all those stories. Master and slave drives are perfectly acceptable, since primary and secondary storage devices can mean many different things.

...and they want their 3-letter filename extensions back. Seriously, "br" would be fine, as well as "brot" or even "brotli". It amazes me that, 20 years after MS/DOS basically reached its end-of-life, people are still thinking within those constraints.

EFI is the new boot standard, which will probably be the standard for 30 years or so. It boots from a FAT volume. On FAT, the real file names (which must be unique) are 8.3. Long "names" are stored as a secondary attribute of the file. Thus, three-letter extensions are still a major standard, and will be for decades.

EFI is 20 years old, it's hardly a "new" standard. And if you look into current version's (UEFI) specification 12.3.1.2:http://www.uefi.org/sites/defa... [uefi.org]you will see that filesystem used on ESP supports long file names.So please stop disinformation.

I invite posters to list below everything that offends. I expect a long list, so I'll start the ball (!) rolling:

I'm really, DEEPLY offended that some random people on the internet decided to change a file extension for a file format I have never used and have no say in. It offends me to my very core for reasons I can't fully explain.

Yes, I am being sarcastic about a large number of comments on this thread from the permanently offended crowd.

It's a file extension and it's not yours. Person gets to change it if he likes for any reason he likes. Don't like that it's not ".bro" any more? Well, your only recourse is to whine all over the internet about it.

Centuries ago, you got into serious problems if you ran around claiming you have a mission to fulfil the devil gave you. Now, this gets replaced by feminism, and everybody who doesn't join in the holy movement is an infidel who should be punished. The level of intolerance towards people who aren't "feminists" is raising and raising.

If they really wanted to help women, they should go to india, help solving its rape problem, or to saudi arabia, where women get stoned when they sleep with men who aren't their husband.

A white officer shooting a black suspect isn't a problem. It becomes a problem when the shooting has no legal justification, such as when the suspect is unarmed and posed no immediate threat. It becomes a racial problem when people start to notice that this situation occurs a lot more often with black victims than with white victims.

Yet another example of political-correctness gone insane. People are not upset, some SJWarrier decides to be insulted by 'bro' and therefore it must be changed. Anyone who says different is a misogynist. Enough of the PC bullshit already. If some people decide to be insulted by some aspect of contemporary culture then that's their prerogative. It's got nothing to do with me, I am under no compulsion to adjust my behaviour or opinions to suit them.

"Can I talk you out of it?," replied Mozilla SW engineer Patrick McManus. "'bro' has a gender problem, even though the dual meaning is unintentional. It comes of[f] misogynistic and unprofessional due to the world it lives in."

The rational thing is to change the extension to something neutral. It's just a technical detail and does not matter that much, so it's sensible to just be polite to those idi... humans who feel there is a problem.

Of course once you're polite, you get a bunch of other idi... humans saying they find the change of the extension without a technical reason offensive, and would like it changed back, failing to understand that they want it changed back for an equally non-technical "feel-good" reason.

Oh the irony.

Obviously it would be different if there was a good technical reason to demand just that one particular extension, but there isn't. It'd also be different if the new extension (instead of the act of changing it) was potentially as offensive.

But that's exactly the point: Getting worked up over nothing to "draw attention to the problem". Hey, it worked for the blacks! Cry "racism" every time someone orders toast instead of brown bread and make people insecure about the most insignificant thing they do and question whether it is "morally acceptable".

BULL SHIT!

All the whole crap really did was piss me off. Yes, there is a problem, yes, we're working on it. But pissing the whole population off by forcing your problem down their throat is not going

No. The world has a "Whiny immature woman without a spine" problem. Lately we can't even bring up the topic of "gender" without having some fucking whore (yes, I'm using it intentionally. It's the internet. If you don't like it close the window. No one is forcing you to read this comment.) whining that "It's SOOOOOO offensive, and my little brain can't deal with the (non-intended) meanings so let's ban it!"

/rant

I've got a one step solution to all of this:1. Stop giving a fuck until these morons grow up and actually have a real issue to present.

Seriously, every time I read shit like this, I wonder what kind of fucked in the head woman read / heard / whatever the material. Because a rational person would not read ".bro" and immediately think of "Gender inequality!" A person who would is either seriously fucked up in the head, or out to get something by taking advantage of others. This needs to stop. It's not solving any real issue and it takes away focus from the real issues that need to be addressed. For example: Equal pay regardless of gender, better support for abuse victims, etc.

As for the sane women out there, 1. I apologize, but it needed, and still needs, to be said. 2. You need to start decrying these abusers and force them off the stage. Because for every single time you bring up a real issue that does need to be addressed, people think of these abusers and that puts them into a mindset of suspicion of intent, or just an outright unwillingness to help you.

Problem is you can't really ignore it. Every time some professional victim comes around whining about how much their life sucks (which their life only sucks because they think it sucks -- ask any psychologist this question, they'll agree with me) then we start getting stupid laws that make everybody else bend over backwards for the professional victims.

Take for example all of the lawsuits against businesses for not complying with ADA rules, even when the supposed "victim" didn't even try to go the business they're suing.

I've got a one step solution to all of this:
1. Stop giving a fuck until these morons grow up and actually have a real issue to present.

Although I agree with every word that you've said, would you not agree that there might be some objection to the following file extensions:.jew for racial profiling data.old for genealogy data.ass for anatomical data

The fact is that there does exist a border where some three letter combinations are seen as having meaning, that is the whole purpose that letters were invented in the first place. The question is _where_ is the line drawn. You and I agree that.bro has not yet reached it, but clearly we are getting closer and closer.

I disagree - we do have a gender problem. To be acceptable to the social justice sector, males must be emasculated and impotent. I've had recent dealings with some silly cunt who occcupies a "human relations" position. She makes it pretty obvious that she doesn't like men very much, and she especially doesn't like men who speak their minds. If there are any men whom she actually approves of, then they are men who are intimidated by her.

To be fair, she doesn't very much like women who aren't intimidated, either. My boss, a female, has had some rounds with the SJW bitch as well.

Friend, there is something I've been saying for decades now: The surest way to ruin a Good Thing is to get a bunch of people involved in it. That's what's happening here: There are too many people in the world, and more to the point too many people on the Internet, and it's just ruining everything for everyone because whereas it's actually a small percentage of people who might get offended at something so small, that small percentage represents a huge number of people, who are not going to allow themselves to be ignored. Case in point: I work at a large technology corporation. There is a small software tool that developers use, and a 32-bit hexadecimal value that shows up in one dialog box defaults to the hex value "DEADBEEF". Clever, right? Also harmless and not at all intended to be offensive. But someone got offended and they made them change it. Stupid, isn't it? Get enough people together and collectively they don't have a sense of humor anymore.

There is a small software tool that developers use, and a 32-bit hexadecimal value that shows up in one dialog box defaults to the hex value "DEADBEEF". Clever, right? Also harmless and not at all intended to be offensive. But someone got offended and they made them change it.

This amuses me, so I'll post it. When I see an acronym, my reading mind actually pronounces the words. So "an SJW" is read as "an social justice warrior" and therefore sounds awful. Maybe this is why people always avoid using an indefinite article with definition-ambiguous acronyms.

Indeed. Maybe I'm getting old, or just like trying to be thoughtful about how I treat my fellow human beings of whatever gender/etc, or maybe just as a British English speaker... (a) using this "SJW" term as some sort of demonisation seems unhelpful and (b) some of the comments in this story have been rank with small-minded "I'm all right Jack" selfishness. I wonder how many of those making those remarks have ever been on the wrong end of a despised (minority) grouping for any significant time?

A perjorative label is useful when the target is not only wrong, but wrong in a way sufficiently obvious or well-known that they do not merit the time required to write a detailed refutation of their argument. Sometimes an argument is so pathetic that the correct response is not refutation but outright mockery.

The suite of arguments characterized as 'SJW' is quite wide, and a lot of them do have serious merit - for example, the 'damsel in distress' is overused in computer games. The problem with the SJW crowd is that they use overwhelmingly poor arguments, ridiculous arguments, and do so in a most obnoxious manner. As we see in this case: Someone, somewhere, cannot see the letters 'bro' used as a contraction for a type of pastry without concluding that this is actually a conspiracy of programmers in the male-dominated world of technology to intimidate females out of the field by creating a hostile work environment.

The root of the problem is one that can also be seen in many with a single-minded dedication to a religion or to another political cause. To a person who owns only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To a person who has made the crusade against sexism a central pillar of their identity, *everything* looks sexist. Including a.bro file extension. Same applies to race, too.

The default position is the neutral. Listening to your argument, testing its validity and acting accordingly. Yes, dismissing your argument before it is made on grounds of your $minority_group is wrong. But thinking that it is valid because you belong to your $minority_group is just as wrong. Your argument is neither more nor less valid or important because you are you, unless there is a reason for me to consider it more or less valuable based on prior experiences with you.

Think about it for a second. Things are so great for women in the western world that this is what generates complaints. When the complaints are I get hit with rocks trying to go to school, or they cut off my clitoris then you know you are living in a hell hole. Those women don't have time to worry about.bro extensions. When it gets down to the only complaints being file extensions it's means thing are pretty damn good.

There are at least two serious flaws in your reasoning. 1) Just because someone else has it worse, does not mean that things are okay for another. 2) Calling attention to one problem does not imply that it is the only, or even the worst, problem.

A guy with a headache isn't unjustified in complaining about the pain just because someone else is dying from lung cancer. A guy dying of lung cancer is equally justified in complaining about a headache.

And yet, somehow, the men of slashdot are the ones that have their panties in a bunch.

No, we just like to bait SJWs because it's such tremendous fun. The most harmless of words can make them explode into a dazzling display of insane babble... there's nowhere else you can have as much fun with so little effort.

the men of slashdot

Oh, and can I just say... SEXIST!

are the ones that have their panties in a bunch.

TRANSEXIST!

Report to the Re-Education camp for processing, Citizen Anonymous Coward.

rar is not free software, and I believe the open source part of it isn't enough to compress but merely decompress a.rar archive. So in this case it's necessary to reinvent the wheel. Also, a web compression format has different needs to an compression format primarily used for disk-based archival. Web formats need to be fast or your cat videos will take forever and a second to load. Offline formats could be optimized for size so you can store more kittens in your hard drive. Note that there are general pu

The limited use of GIMP has very little to do with its name, and very, very, very much to do with its appalling, abysmal, clunky, counterintuitive user interface. For example, developers who do stupid things like removing the ability to save as anything other than GIMP's own.xcf format from the 'save as' dialog, thereby making it even less intuitive and even less compatible with any other GUI app out there.

I mean, seriously, when I have to search the web to find out how to save a.jpg with a new GIMP release, the UI is fscked.

SJW's are, so are 3rd wave feminists. Which of course is why you now see popular culture starting to mocking them. And why 82% of women no longer call themselves feminists, [nytimes.com] rather they're following egalitarianism or something along those lines. They already know that modern feminism has a man-hatred problem, and large numbers of people see a serious problem with SJWs and their public attacks on people, and being perpetually outraged.